


Push and Pull

by sowell



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:06:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sowell/pseuds/sowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Weevil + Veronica = the most badass roommates ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Push and Pull

"Are you lost?" she asks when he shows up on her doorstep.

"My grandmother kicked me out. I got nowhere else to go." His eyes are steady on hers, but there’s tension in the curve of his shoulders.

"Come on," he says, when she doesn’t answer. "You owe me, Mars."

"I don’t know…I’m pretty sure we were even this time around."

"Then you should double-check that calculator in your head." His rough voice is loose, the forced-casual nonchalance of someone who has too much riding on this conversation. She doesn’t like it, doesn’t like to see that shame in him.

So she lets him in.

*

When she tells Logan, she expects raging jealousy. Anger, incredulity, flat-out refusal. What she gets is ten solid minutes of laughter.

"Weevil," he gasps, "and you. Roomies. Lamb’s gonna shit himself."

Instead of being put off by Weevil’s presence, he starts to drop by her place more often. At first she thinks he’s staking his claim, making sure that nothing illicit is happening. After a while she realizes that he’s  _hoping_  to run into Weevil. He shows up when he knows Weevil will be home, seemingly for the sole purpose of flinging some taunt about Weevil’s a) family b) ethnicity c) financial status d) (lack of) sexual prowess. Veronica’s pretty sure he wastes hours just thinking of clever insults.

They sit on her couch one night and watch a movie, and she sees his eyes sliding off to the side, toward Weevil’s closed bedroom door. He nibbles on her neck, whispers dirty things in her ear like always, but she can feel his distraction. It isn’t long before she starts to wonder if her boyfriend has a crush on her new roommate.

*

The first night that Weevil stays out late she searches his room, top to bottom. She dumps out his duffel bag, rifles through all his pants pockets, prods her way around his mattress and slides her palms flat under his pillowcases. She’s certain he came to her for some nefarious purpose, but his room isn’t talking. She’s forced to stop her search when she reaches his underwear drawer. There’s a torn slip of notebook paper lying on top of the rows of folded boxers that says, "Find Anything?" in Weevil’s scratch-slanted handwriting.

She goes to bed feeling like an amateur.

The next morning he pushes open her bedroom door without knocking. She’s barely dressed – wet hair, bra and underwear, her jeans pulled halfway up her hips. He raises an eyebrow, eyes traveling over her exposed skin, and she tries to play it cool, despite the flush she can feel spreading  _everywhere_. She calmly zips up her fly and turns to face him, skimpy bra and all.

"You got something you wanna ask me?" he says, raising an eyebrow.

Well, fine.

"Are you running drugs out of the apartment?" she says bluntly.

He takes his sweet time answering, crosses his bare arms, leans his torso against her doorframe, studies her through half-closed eyes. Then he says, "What would be worse? If I was, and you couldn’t figure out how I was doing it? Or if I was innocent, and you were just plain wrong?"

"I know you didn’t just show up here randomly," she warns him.

He chuckles. "You got too much time on your hands." And leaves the room without even commenting on her skimpy bra.

She still has the distinct feeling she’s being played.

*

They eat together in the mornings, quietly across from each other at her kitchen table. Neither of them reads the paper, and neither of them watches the news, so it’s just the slurp of milk and the sugary crunch of fruit loops for ten endless minutes. They don’t have much to talk about. The only things she wants to ask him are the things he’d never answer, like, "Why did you get kicked out?" and "Where do you go when you stay out so late?" and "Why on earth did you come to  _me_?"

Silence has always made her itchy, which is why she fits so perfectly with Logan. No danger of silence there. But she has to admit that she kind of likes the mornings with Weevil.

*

Weevil does the dishes. Weevil cooks at night. Weevil takes out the trash and keeps his room neat as a pin and never brings girls back to her apartment, which is a good fucking thing. He’s so suspiciously perfect that she decides he must be desperate not to get thrown out.

"You’re running from something," she concludes triumphantly. "You have someone after you, and you need a place to hide out."

"Yeah, that makes sense," he says, without looking up from his plate of tamales. He really is a fantastic cook. "No one in Neptune would  _ever_ think to look here for a fugitive."

*

Weevil does push-ups. Like, obsessively. They’re watching TV one night, and he’s on the floor in front of her couch, lifting and lowering himself in a quick motion that makes her dizzy.

"We have a gym in the apartment complex, you know."

"Gyms," he grunts out, never slowing, "are for prissy white boys." She watches the flex of his muscles, the overlaying sheen of sweat, the stretch of his tattoos, and she feels dizzy in an entirely different way.

He tells her he started his push-up habit when he got suspended from the sixth grade for the first time. "My grandmother banished me to my room for a week. By the time she let me out of the house again I could do them one-handed with my cousins sitting on top of me."

"Stop, I’m swooning," she deadpans.

She ends up perching cross-legged on his broad back, trying to keep her balance as he does rhythmic pushups under her. She can feel the ripple of muscle and bone in his back, the sticky cotton of his shirt against her skin. She likes when he lowers himself to the ground and his shoulder blades dig against the bottom of her thighs.

She closes her eyes and breathes, feels the solidity of him under her, the unceasing motion. The strength and the power in his body.

"I always knew I’d have you riding me eventually," he says, wheezing out the words.

"You really are predictable," she tells him.

*

Logan has very talented hands. She feels sorry for the middle-aged women on TV who talk about how boring their sex lives are, for the young girls at her office who can’t seem to find the right man. She shivers just thinking about the quick movement of his long fingers, about how perfectly he fits inside of her.

But sometimes, when he’s thrusting into her, when they’re sticking skin against skin, and she’s almost there…she pretends the aristocratic palms sliding over her breasts are callused and brown. She imagines the give and pull of shoulder blades under her thighs, and that’s what sends her over the edge.

*

One Friday night, when they’ve both had one too many beers, she asks him, "Did you ever wonder about it, back in high school? The two of us?"

"I didn’t think I was in your tax bracket," he says calmly.

Well, she should have expected that. He’s never shied away from low blows before. "I thought about it," she tells him serenely, just to see the look of shock that crosses his face. She’s not disappointed.

He recovers quickly, though. "Should I consider that an invitation?" he leers.

"Is that why you’re here?" she asks sharply. "Is this some leftover…thing with you and Logan? Like, some pissing contest belt notch thing?"

Logan’s name goads a reaction out of him the way none of her other accusations have managed to do. "Fucking pain in the ass," he mutters, stomping out of the room. He passes by her minutes later, encased in his leather jacket, cigarette carton peeking out of the pocket.

"Don’t be late, honeybunch," she calls after him, acid coated in sugar. "And don’t do drugs!"

He stumbles in hours later, when she’s lying in her bed, staring unblinking at her bedroom ceiling. Weevil usually moves soundlessly, but his feet are practically dragging across her hard wood floors. She hears a muffled thump and a violent curse, and if she concentrates hard enough she can almost smell the alcoholic tang through the wall.

Her mother used to come home like this, with the air of tequila and desperation all around her, doing her best impression of silence for her wide-awake husband and daughter. She creeps into the hallway to see him sunk against the wall, body folded over with his forehead in his hands.

She pulls him to his feet, even though he’s basically dead weight and miles from coherent. He mumbles against her hair as she leads him to his room. She has no idea what he’s saying, but she thinks she hears a ridiculously polite "thank you" somewhere in there. She has to practically roll on the bed with him to get his slack limbs to cooperate. She leaves him there on his stomach with his arm curled under a pillow.

He sleeps the entire next day. She tries not to worry. She still doesn’t know what kind of game he’s playing with her, but she tells herself that he’s a big boy and can take care of himself. Still, she checks on him. Every time she cracks his door open he’s shifted positions, so at least she knows he’s not dead. Four ‘o clock goes by; then five, then six. She tries to make tamales the way she saw him do it, but the corn husks won’t bend properly for her. After thirty minutes she gives up and pours cereal for dinner instead.

When he finally emerges, she’s in her pajamas, heading for bed again. "Better?" she asks him. He’s pale but calm, and his face holds no trace of whatever tipped his emotional balance last night.

"Better," he agrees. He glances at the shredded corn husks in a heap by the sink. "Don’t even try," he advises her. "I don’t want you screwing with my favorite meal."

*

She sits on his bed and watches him pack his things the day he leaves, watches every bit of his presence disappear into his huge black duffel bag. The sheets on the bed smell like him – leather and sweat and spice. She knows she won’t wash them until she absolutely has to.

"Where are you going to go?" she asks him as he folds up a pair of jeans. He shrugs in response. "Are you staying in Neptune?" she tries, wishing her voice didn’t sound like a little girl’s.

"I doubt I’ll get far," he says, expression impenetrable.

They both pause on her doorstep, and she wonders if he’s as reluctant to turn his back as she is to see him go. "You weren’t running drugs," she says, feeling strangely hurt. "You were telling the truth." It’s like he pulled the wool over her eyes simply by not trying to pull the wool over her eyes.

He smiles with no teeth, a Cheshire grin that doesn’t confirm or deny anything.

"You really just had no place else to go?" she insists.

"Well," he says, briefly ducking his head. Just,  _well_.

"You owe me one, now," she tells him, and she’s close to tears for some reason she can’t even fathom. "You’re not going to disappear before I can collect, right?"

He tugs gently on one of her pigtails. "Stop fighting all the damn time, Mars."

She wants to retort that he’s one to talk; he’s been fighting since the day she met him: fighting the 09ers, fighting for respect, fighting for his life. But she really thinks if she opens her mouth the lump in her throat will dissolve into tears, and she doesn’t ever want to cry in front of Weevil. She couldn’t handle it if he tried to comfort her, and asked for nothing in return.

She hears his car pull away from the building, but she doesn’t give into the temptation to peek out the window.

*

Logan comes over that night. His face falls comically when she tells him Weevil is gone. "Well, did he leave any Mexican food?" Logan asks, heading toward her fridge.

They eat leftovers, and she decides that when he comes back, she’s going to demand cooking lessons. She’ll make him spend hours in the kitchen with her until she can make tamales every bit as good as his.

That’ll teach him.


End file.
